Oh I get it.
They’re all cousins. /Trolololol
Remember Sailor Moon Dub anyone?
Yup, making them related without removing any of the subtext. So they went from being lesbians to being incestuous lesbians.
And they were roommates
Brad, the hottest guy at school
And no Owl House? Crikey…
Spoilers
“There is no heterosexual explanation for this.”
Possible it was drawn before Owl House got good?
Edit: and by got good, i mean got explicitly gay!
Insane to not include TOH.
i know all of them except the one with trans flag and the girl next to her
Also, man i wish there were as many mlm couples as wlw
women loving men?
sorry just edited, meant wlw as women loving women
so many of these characters were so formative for me figuring things out as a kid, it was comforting to see someone else that I felt reflected in, being able to say like “oh hey that’s how I feel”
REPRESENTATION MATTERS
(All but one character is a lesbian couple)
Arguably, Garnet is the only character who is a lesbian couple.
Off topic, but not capitalizing on Korrasami is one of the stupidest things Viacom has ever done, lol. Which is saying something.
How could they possibly think “No one will like this, quietly sweep it under the rug…”
Worth noting: at the time, any reference to a gay relationship was disqualifying for a TV-Y7 rating.
We have come a long way these last several years.
Its always a positive feeling seen.
I love this
Where’s muh gurl Beckett Mariner?
The bottom row is a story in three acts.
Marcelline and Bonnibel was deliberately hinted at - but only hinted at - by the exceptionally queer staff of Adventure Time. Initially just making it a reveal that they knew each other (with Marcie being the first to mention Princess Bubblegum’s given name, IIRC) but eventually having a whole musical episode where they had unspecified past conflict. At which point, someone on the non-televised and non-canonical after-show joked about how it sounded like they used to be girlfriends. Cartoon Network fired that guy - ended the after-show - and didn’t feature Marcelline for the rest of the season. Those assholes spent years suppressing the barest fucking suggestion that these two cagey immortals had any kind of meaningful relationship, everrr.
Korra and Asami were written as a properly slow-burn romance between two bisexual women. Possibly not from the start? I think the writers just noticed some chemistry and leaned into it. The showrunners had a coy attitude toward queer content, seeing what Nickelodeon would let them get away with, but never really pushing their boundaries. (Honestly both Avatar series had enough trouble staying funded. Every cartoon becomes a tie-in for another company’s toy line.) The shipping chart for the four protagonists was deliberately fluid and melodramatic, early on, and arguably teased some M/M stuff via Bolin not being able to tell apart Desna and Eska. Nonetheless it took until the back half of season two for Korra to say “I’ve never had a girlfriend like you,” with a big fat dollop of plausible deniability on the colloquial meaning for “girl friend.” And even though they went through some shit in season three, the show only let them hold hands and walk off into the sunset at literally the last second, in the finale episode that wasn’t even aired on actual television. Bryan Konietzko had to tweet that yes, that was supposed to be confirmed for gay, no seriously, we did the thing.
Adora and Catra… listen. The pitch meeting to Netflix might as well have been ND Stevenson announcing “We’re gonna re-do She-Ra and it’s gonna be gay as fuck.” All the animators who’d been told to stop hinting at queer stuff were still in the industry, and they said, okay - we’ll stop hinting. So She-Ra is a universe where even the genocidal bad guys don’t express homophobia, the apparently-inevitable prom episode has an F/F/F love triangle going on, and all these gay creators who know gay stuff is just not a big deal put all their effort into weird plot shit. Oh, and neurodivergence, because that’s harder to get right. So the one straight-ish character I can think of is the autistic-coded, robot-fucking… lavender eldritch horror. The show also makes the shapeshifter nonbinary, and fans have decided there’s at least one polycule, aaand if Stevenson casually mentioned that Perfuma was trans it’d be zero percent surprising.
Adventure Time recently had some spinoff movies. One prominently featured Marcie & Bonnie being all domestic and shit. Why would it possibly be a big deal? Honestly the funniest part is that Princess Bubblegum is probably asexual. Cartoon Network threw an industry-shaking shit-fit over the idea of two women hugging.
Admittedly this reading glosses over Stephen Universe being deliberately set-up to force Cartoon Network to acknowledge gay stuff. All the gems are allegedly nonbinary, but consistently she/her. Their relationships literally fuse people together. One of the central characters is the red/blue pair in the center… three seasons in. Rebecca Sugar, hot off Adventure Time’s corporate case of the notgays, got to reveal that there’s a been married lesbian couple onscreen since episode one.
Aaand Cartoon Network Europe still yanked their funding once that red/blue pair got an actual wedding.
I demand a list of all the characters in this picture!.. Please…
The ones I recognize are, starting at the top and going clockwise:
Cassandra (Assassin’s Creed Odyssey)
Chloe Price and Max Caulfield (Life is Strange)
Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn (Batman/DC)
Princess Bubblegum and Marcelline (Adventure Time)
Korra and Asami Sato (Legend of Korra)
Adora and Catra (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power)
Sailor Uranus and Neptune (Sailor Moon)
The blue and red in the middle are Ruby and Sapphire from Steven Universe
Okay, but who’s the one with the trans flag?
That’s a minor character from RWBY, in the later seasons when the show gets bad.
No Luz and Amity?
I am more of a Banana Fish guy
I thought Harley is typically with the joker? Was that updated at some point?
Harley and Ivy have had an on-again off-again thing going since the late 90’s or mid 00’s. It’s been at least decade since Harley ditched Joker in the mainline comics and moved on to greener pastures.
They actually first implied it during the Batman: The Animated Series, as a “Sappho and her friend” style relationship, only coming out and saying it later in the comics.
Ivy what you did there.
I dunno, I’ll bet the underbrush matches the canopy.
Harley is bisexual, a demographic which often gets erased the moment they’re not actively flirting with multiple people of different genders at the same exact time.
Shout-out to The Owl House for having a very bi-heavy cast, in addition to the central F/F ship.
Kinda weird they’re not in this picture.
Harley hasn’t really been a thing with the Joker since forever. The comics have had her and Ivy as a thing for years.
The new(er) Harley Quinn animated series. it’s very good. It’s got big kite energy.
I put off watching that for a long time because I didn’t really like the Harley Quinn character and her obsession with Joker and that whole abusive relationship they had, compounded by all the people who treated Harley and Joker like it was a relationship goal.
But I was very pleasantly surprised when I did eventually give it a shot. Yeah, it does include some Harley and J stuff, but they kinda had to because of how ingrained that relationship was into Harley’s pop culture identity. But it is done well. The series is one of my favorite in the Batman mythos.
It’s also kinda interesting how Ivy seems to be holding up better morally than Batman himself does. She’s an environmental warrior while he’s a status quo warrior, and that billionaire side of him holds up less and less well as it becomes more and more apparent that even billionaire philanthropists are really just taking credit for giving away wealth they shouldn’t have had in the first place.
Technically in Steven Universe, being gay is fine but being straight is a big no-no. If gems are all the same species, then the gem type is their own gender. Ruby is allowed to fuse with other rubies, that’s fine and normal. But fusing with someone of a different gender (Sapphire) is what gem society treats as disgusting and unnatural.
Sure, if you apply human standards to Ruby and Sapphire, then they’re both fembies and therefore gay. But if you do that, then you’re not really trying to understand gender roles as gems see them. And when dealing with a foreign culture it’s important to be capable of seeing the world as they see it. Gem society is heterophobic, and permeated by the normalisation of loveless homosexual relationships. And that’s why Ruby and Sapphire belong here, because they’re ostracised for who they love, and it doesn’t really matter what the justification for the oppression is, but it’s a very fun thought exercise to try and understand it.
Also Adora is a monarchist and doesn’t deserve to be in this picture. Rainbow monarchism is still monarchism.
You’re doing a lot of leg work to feel persecuted by cartoons while ignoring the cis straight allo monarchy of reality.
It doesn’t take any work at all to feel persecuted by reality when I’m nonbinary and gay. That’s why I’m an antirealist. Are you some kind of homophobe calling me a fragile snowflake for liking gay representation in cartoons? I can’t make heads or tails of your point so I’m gonna assume it’s some qanon nonsense.
Is that what you were trying to say? Because your post reads like you are upset at gay representation because it’s an attack on straight cis people.
being gay is fine but being straight is a big no-no
Gem society is heterophobic
Rainbow monarchism is still monarchism.
These are all points I have heard from bigots complaining about straight persecution that think queer people get special treatment.
I wasn’t talking about social norms among humans on earth. I was talking about social norms among a fictional society of magic rocks from outer space. How much do you actually know about Steven Universe lore? I thought I was giving a pretty clear overview of the mechanics of gem society, but maybe my comment wasn’t very comprehensible to someone who’s never seen Steven Universe.
Also if your homophobes are anti monarchist, they’re a lot cooler than the homophobes I’ve met
anti monarchist
They would probably say tyrant, but same thing.
about the Steven Universe lore.
I’ve seen the show and movie several times, but I think you’re splitting hairs and misrepresenting the message, just like those that say Steven was wrong to redem the diamonds. To focus on the theoritcal herophobia in the minutia of the show created in our very hetero centric world is missing the point of having repsentation, which is why your post reads like bigoted motivated reasoning for straight prosecution.
But I’m not particularly interested in dissecting the lore of cartoons today, you’re entitled to think what you like just as I’m entitled to disagree. It’s just confusing as to why you are bringing this up in a thread about repsentation. To me, it reads like you are just trying to shoe horn “heteropboia” as a critism of queer cartoons, not as support.
Why would I want to criticise diversity? Steven Universe has various relationships which are gay by human standards, but if you look deeper and acknowledge that gender is a social construct, are straight. That’s novel and unique and interesting and different. Why would I criticise such interesting ideas that make the show feel richer? I don’t understand your need to categorise my analysis of the show as joyless. There’s lots of joy in it. It’s cool!
SU is great! So of course I believe you have joy in it
I think the takeaway here is that your intent got lost in your delivery. Personally, I find it helpful to come back to a thread I was downvoted in a week or two after the fact when im less invested and more objective. Distance can help me understand why others disagreed. Respectfully, I think you should consider doing simmiliar. These sort of lore analysis makes sense in a SU focused place, but here and now your original comment reads like homophonia. Nit trying g to attack you, but inforn you how it comes across.
Much love, go in peace! ♥ ✌️
